Hello there folks.
CMJ; are you still looking for ideas? I've had a few in my less rational moments. Is too much req still a problem? If so, then may I recomend stopping the bank giving interest? There's no particular need for it that I can see, we use the bank to keep our money safe. In fact you could even charge interest for keeping it, although this would probably hit PvP players more than non-PvPer's, who can just keep their money on them when they go to sleep.
That's an easy one, my other ideas are big, and dreamt up in a fever. Also they probably don't fit in at all with S2 mechanics. Do you want them?
I've been enjoying being back on the island by the way. Love the icons in the chat spaces, and you seem to have tidied up the page links a bit as well? They seem to be sweeter than I remember, or is that just me?

Hairy Mary / Cantankerous Biggs

Well, kind of.

I've got a list of the things that absolutely must be in Season Two from the very start, and I'm concentrating on those just so I can get the bastard launched. I have a further list of things that I can put in soon after launch, and a further list of things that I can put in place later on. I'm looking for a launch of Season Two on the first of July, if at all possible, with additional content to be put in place over its effective lifetime.

The biggest reason for going to S2 right now is an improved framework. With the Stamina system, the new Item system, Mount Accessories and other features, all we've really got right now is a system that will expand much more easily than the system in Season One. For example, writing a new item will now take about fifteen minutes rather than half a day. Creating a new thing to do (for the sake of example, chopping wood, scavenging for scrap, whatever) can hook into the Stamina system rather than requiring its own bank of Turns, making the game much easier to balance.

Basically at the start of Season Two, there won't be a huge amount of new content - but writing that content while keeping the game balanced will be much, much easier, and we won't have to do big resets and big re-thinks whenever we want to put major new stuff in. I want S2 to last a solid year just like S1, only with much more content being gradually added over that year.

The unbalanced Requisition payouts have been fixed by not awarding as much Req for killing monsters (seriously, 536 Req for a level 16 monster? When was that ever a good idea?), eliminating weapon and armour gifting (giving top-level equipment to a lv5 Newbie kills the challenge - the only ones who stick around are the ones who are heavily into roleplay), necessitating further spending (players must eat to avoid Stamina penalties from starvation), getting rid of the ways that allow players to hoard Req between DK's (no more Vending, and items are destroyed at DK) and balancing out these negatives with new and different ways to make money.

PvP in its current form is being done away with completely and replaced with two new systems that are entirely opt-in.

Basically S2 will be so different from S1 that I'm keeping S1 open in a subdomain for the inevitable people who will prefer it to S2.

As such, yes, ideas are still welcome for me to put on my "After-Launch" list - but bear in mind that ideas that interface with Season One might not apply to what we'll be doing in S2.

Example - Good Idea:
"I think we should put in a fishing system. Let people wade into the rivers and ocean and hunt for highly improbable marine life."
This is a good idea because it's entirely new, and could conceivably fit in just about any game. Thus, there's nothing stopping us from putting this in S2.

Example - Not-So-Good Idea, or perhaps Good-For-S1-But-Redundant-Now:
"I think we could balance out PvP by allowing multiple low-level characters to team up against a high-level character."
This idea isn't quite as good because it assumes we'll be continuing with PvP the way we have done in the pilot and S1 - it's fixing a problem that no longer exists. As such, it's actually not a bad idea, but it's redundant. Like coming up with a wonderful new design for an ultra-efficient, solar-powered email-enabled landline phone, when everyone's already got a computer (or a mobile that does E-mail).

With that in mind, I'm always interested in ideas - so by all means, let's hear 'em.

(with regards to page links - I did change a few minor things with the template, but most of the extensive tidying-up work was actually done in a testing version of S2 that isn't live yet)

A couple possible ideas:

Swimming lessons:
As you gain experience/levels in swimming, it'll cost less stamina to travel on water.

or a Water-based transport (raft, dolphin, etc.) which also makes water travel cost less.

Instead of malfunctioning cameras, wouldn't it seem likely that since this island seems to be able to travel through time (hence the nuns) at one point or another, pirates would have stumbled across it and buried some treasure? So you can go "treasure hunting"; with more experience, they become easier to find. But for a risk; some chests could be booby-trapped, thus killing/injuring/de-buffing the contestant that finds them.


Or, perhaps, similar to your "report a monster", players can report "Improbable Events", or actual buildings for out-posts/locations (eg Bortwoods Bar in the Grassy Field), with a brief description that describes where it came from.

What's the ETA for S2?

July 1st.

Sweet. Will we retain our DKs?

No. You'll lose everything except Donator Points.

We'll lose everything except Donator Points... and those artifacts and/or secondary beings constructed entirely of words that we choose to bring with us.

For instance, Bernard, you can still have Phyllis... um. Bad example, maybe.

How about some way to acknowledge the accomplishments of the people who made it up to the first page of the Hall of Fame list? There are quite a few players in S1 who have achieved so much through their dedication to playing on the Island, be it Drive Kills, PvP, Charm, Toughness, and the rest of the categories. I'd love to be able to go somewhere in S2 and see a record of the HoF as it stands on the last official day of S1 before the relaunch.

Did that not make any sense? If so, please blame it upon my extreme lack of sleep because I play this game entirely too much.

I remember this coming up before, I'm nearly 100% certain CMJ said he was going to have a section in the HoF for the Season 1 records.

Have I understood this correctly? You're going to have items disappear at Drive Kill, but be able to gift them? Won't everybody use the same dodge that they're currently using for req? Gifting them between each other just before Drive Kill?

The way Gifting works, items are delivered at the next game day - so if a player were to transfer items to another player before doing a DK, you'd have a situation like this:

Cheater A transfers some items to Cheater B on Game Day 1, before going off to do his Drive Kill.
Cheater B gets Cheater A's items on Game Day 2, and transfers them back.
Cheater A gets his items back on Game Day 3.

So, there's gonna be a bit of a delay which will discourage transfers across DK's. The soft limits on how much a player can carry will also put a damper on things - but I'm also thinking of blocking access to the gifting station for characters over, say, level twelve, and putting in a limit for how much a player can have delivered to them in a single day.

If we're going to have gifting at all, there's always gonna be some folks who'll use it to keep their items across DK's. :-/ If you've got ideas to minimize the cheating while still allowing altruism, let me know.

I think it would be better if you put a limit to the amount put in the crate and allow everyone to only get one/two crates a day or only allow them to send out two/three crates a day, but definitely no limit to level. It is right before DKs that people are most gifting with some of the extra req they have jingling in their pockets.

Or, if it makes more sense, a weight limit to each crate along with an item limit (so you can't ship infinite numbers of near weightless stuff). Assuming the big items are the ones people would want to carry over, make them get many crates to ship it all, and if you impose a limit on how many crates you can send in a day then they'd have to start earlier, so much so to make it much more annoying. Then crates with nice, smaller stuff could still be a 'Newbie Kit' that the altruistic ones of us can make and gift, and newbies will be less likely to get the 'bigger' items so the level five problem you mentioned before doesn't happen again.

i for one never really saw the point of gifting. In a game like this, unless heavily restricted, it only enables people to transfer stuff between DKs.
I'd suggest only allowing gifting for less important stuff than weapons or armour, things like food, small amounts of req or transporters(?). Also i think limiting the amounts of times one can gift stuff each day should be limited to only a few times.